A Christian devotee, Anil Antony, asked Me some questions just now. He asked whether the salvation is a free gift of God and not based on the work. This is the climax of foolishness. Even in the worldly affairs, a selection board sits and filters the deserving candidate to give the gift. If any body in this world gives a free gift without seeing the deserving qualifications, people will call him as a full mad person. Do you treat God as mad person, who is wiser than the wisest in this world? Jesus asked His devotees to go to villages and propagate His knowledge. Even today the Christian fathers wander all over the earth and they are propagating the diving knowledge by constant lecturers. Is this not work? If salvation is a free gift why should they work? How much divine work Jesus carried on? In Hinduism you can support free gift by saying that a soul might have done lot of good work in the previous birth and the gift may appear as free gift because the soul did not perform any good work in this birth. But Christianity does not believe the re-birth and therefore such possibility of explanation is also ruled out here.

His another question is that Christianity encourages the praise and prayer of the Lord for certain materialistic benefits. He asks whether such prayer is correct. The answer is that such a stage is not incorrect but it is a lower stage. The LKG class is the beginning of school education. You cannot say that LKG is class is not correct. It is correct but it is lowest. The first step is true but is the lowest step existing on the ground. If you take the case of Jesus, He is in the highest step. He also praised and prayed the Lord but never asked anything for himself. He asked any thing only for the propagation of the fame of the Lord. The lowest step is certainly better than the pit, which is lower than the ground. Thus the beginner is certainly better than the atheist, who does not believe God at all. Even though the beginner is selfish, at least he believes the existence of God.

Like anything worthwhile, salvation is a gift needed to be worked for, so that you prove your worth before the Father on High. We can see that the gift of salvation was freely given because of the mercies of the Father on High and His love for humanity, but even with that so, that doesn't mean all are deserving of such a gift, so we must work to prove that we are, indeed.

Just as the Holy Son put in works, to prove before men and women, that He was the savior come in the flesh to sacrifice His own body for our sins and we'd have salvation, and just as He put in work in all of His teachings of the Holy Scriptures, so that belief in the Father from the faithful would not waver nor belief in His resurrection from the dead as He had afore told them, we must put in works to show we are servants of the Father and the Son in the flesh, and that in the Spirit we lack not faith nor belief.

We must do as He did, and walk as He walk, if we are to be proven worthy of His justification for our works.